The legal community sometimes reminds me of a weird cult, like some town in British Columbia or wherever populated entirely by Fundamentalist Mormons.

Everyone knows everyone. The people in my office aside, I can hardly go five minutes without running into someone that I know, or, worse, someone who has known me since I was knee-high to a small thing, whose name I couldn't tell you on a bet. Everywhere I go it's "Hello, Miss Barely! How are you this morning, Miss Barely? How's school going, Miss Barely? How's your dad, Miss Barely?"

This is even less fun when it happens first thing Monday morning, like today. I keep expecting someone to boom out "How is your period treating you today, Miss Barely? Got that heavy flow under control?"

Admittedly, this familiarity can be pleasant. It's better than being a faceless number in a call center like I was for years. It's nice, sometimes, to have everyone know you, like the work version of Cheers. But at times, when a girl is still all stomach-crampy and not really feeling the whole "out of bed and at work" thing, sometimes she'd rather be a faceless number than have to smile broadly at fifty people before ten a.m.

Then there's the matter of work clothes. During my Hold Music period, the call center years, it didn't matter what I wore. Once in three years at my last job was I told that I couldn't wear what I was wearing, and even then I wasn't sent home, just told not to wear it back to the call center. When I telecommuted, half the time I wasn't even what most people define as "dressed".

I went this weekend and was basically forced to drop nearly $100 on winter-weight work clothes, because I didn't have anything nice enough without holes or visible stains. I wear heels. Every day. I wear lipstick. And eyeshadow.

Someday I expect someone -- I'm not sure who, that's never clear in this particular anxiety nightmare -- to come up to me, probably in the courthouse, and declaim at length that I am a fraud; that under this headwrap there are foot-and-a-half long dreadlocks, that under my dressing table there are trashy British bondage novels, that under this veneer of sophisticated civilization lurks the heart of an unrepentant, tree-hugging, authority-disrespecting hippie, who would wear jeans every day and smoke in her office if she was given half a chance.

Sometimes I feel like a spy, or a plant. Sometimes I wonder how it is, exactly, that I became a person who doesn't have to walk through the metal detectors to get into public buildings. I suppose it's because if I ever were to pull anything of an unsavory nature, everyone who had been there at the time would be able to chorus, "We know who it was! It was MISS BARELY!"

I guess it's a good thing that, among other things, I'm a rational pacifist.